July 19, 2007

I’m glad to announce that over 48000 people are now using the Super Clean skin. But the sad part is that the google pages account where i had stored the images for the skin has finally run out of bandwidth, due to which, gmail super clean won’t be able to display any background images.

April 24, 2007

Well, after having received so many bugs for Super Clean, I thought I better release a known issues post. I still haven’t found time to sit and squash all these bugs, but trust me I’ll do them soon! Till then, please grin and bear!

Here’s the list (more bugs? comment away!)

Search field: I think on some old versions of Greasemonkey, the search field is very long.

Reply formating: while replying to a mail using the “reply” button, the formating options wont be visible, i.e. options like font colors, highlights are functional but the colors menu is not visible.

Reply drop-down menu: The drop down menu with reply, reply to all etc options was initially hidden for the sake of simplicity, but quite a few people have requested to get this back. This can actually be done by tweaking the code a bit, there’s this small fragment in the code that says “visibility:hidden” just delete it and your reply button will be back. But i don’t recommend this, wait for the new version of GSC.

A horizontal scrollbar appears below the sender’s details when the sender’s email address is very long.

Text may overlap at a few places if your screen width is below 600 pixels or so.

April 22, 2007

The Super Clean Skin is quite simple, and you can edit it yourself with a little knowledge of CSS and Javascript. For a detailed info on how-to create and edit Greasemonkey scripts go to their Dive Into page. This is the first time I’ve written a tutorial like this, so please forgive me this isn’t that good. 🙂

The Header Section

Here we specify the meta data of the script such as name, author info, description etc. The important stuff here is the “@include” which specify the URLs for which this script will be executed. There’s nothing you would want to change, if you intend to customize this skin.

Here we start the actual Javascript code of the script. I’ll Try and explain each of these functions and bits now.

Firstly, the “host” is the URL where I’ve placed all the images that are used by this skin. If you wish, you could place these images on your own system and change this URL accordingly. That would speed up the initial load time a bit (I guess)

var host = 'http://artrulesmyworld.googlepages.com/';

Preferences

Initially, we set the default values of the variables, which will be loaded if the user has not changed the preferences.

Next, we define each of the functions that we attached to the menu. These functions determine what happens when the user clicks on the user script command menus. The logic for each of these functions is quite simple, first, we accept the new value for the preference using javascript prompt, then we copy that value into the preference variable using GM_setValue(‘preferenceName’, newValueLoadInto) and then we refresh the page so that the changes become visible.

Finally, we add the css to the script. We do this using the DOM createElement and appendChild function, a standard GM technique. Here’s a great tutorial on creating DOM elements and accessing them. The variable css holds the css styles that you want to apply for the skin (I will be discussing this soon in another article).

April 20, 2007

I’m so glad that my script was offered as the Download of the day on www.lifehacker.com. Thanks!
LifeHacker has a great deal of customization tools and scripts for Gmail and other web applications. A must visit site.

April 20, 2007

Why Skin Gmail?

Gmail is an amazing email service, its by far the best email service that I’ve come across. The only thing I’m not happy about Gmail is the way it looks. Google guys have done beautiful stuff like Picasa, but Gmail has remained pretty much the same. So, I made “Gmail Super Clean” a simple little skin for Gmail, using Greasemonkey.

The Skin

Gmail Super Clean was made to simplify the way Gmail looks. It’s got quite a few customization options. You can change the logo, fonts, show/hide ads etc using the User script commands on Greasemonkey. I posted this script on userscripts.org, and I’m happy to see that the script has had more than 25,000 installs there (thanks people :)). Besides I’ve been getting quite a lot of emails suggesting ideas/bugs and tips to improve this skin. So, I made this blog is dedicated to this skin, and I’ll try to keep it updated and improve it. If you have comments or new ideas for this skin or bug reports then please do post it here, and I’ll try my best to do something about it.